Chapter 11 #2
“Doing it alone is different from traveling alone. I’m going with her. I’m the only one capable of getting her around faster. It takes years to learn to portal the way I can. Or the king.” Poppy’s expression soured. “I learned from my old master.”
The others rustled with their anxiety, too upset to stay still. Poppy remained unbothered.
Exhaustion suffocated the argument on my own behalf. Whatever the cost, I knew I’d pay it. Poppy had always been up front with me about everything.
If Mike protested, he’d have to go through his grandmother, and I knew without asking he was unwilling to try. Not to mention Poppy was pretty fucking intimidating when she wanted to be.
“Are you sure you have to go now?” Bronwen asked. “We have so much to do at camp…”
“It’s better if I do. We don’t want to risk another fissure. The next one could take us all under.”
Had the camp been targeted by the upheaval? Or had I?
The sooner I figured this out, the sooner I distanced myself, the safer they’d be.
I snoozed for a few hours, with Mike wrapped around me, before Poppy walked in unannounced.
“Take your tentacles off him and get ready to go. I’ve packed you a bag.”
Noren peeled open an eye and sniffed at Poppy, then went back to sleep.
Mike’s leg was flung over my hip. He’d slept too and I didn’t want to wake him to say goodbye, not when he needed the rest.
“What did you pack in this bag?” I whispered as I eased away from him.
“Does it matter?”
Poppy stared at me as I slid into my Converse shoes and stood in front of her. She handed off the bag, waiting until I flung both straps over my shoulders. She never asked if I was prepared. Never told me to hold on tight, or offer any comforting words.
Only an outstretched hand attached to one outcome.
When I took it, she flicked her gaze over my shoulder at Mike before her magic rose.
I shut my eyes against the swell and the sense of breathlessness. Her spell took root, latched, held.
Poppy whisked us away to the place Elfhame had mapped for us. The harsh lines of the drawing were indecipherable at the time, but Poppy already knew. That’s what mattered.
I lost my grip on her when we landed and the cloud of power faded. Coughing, I dropped to all fours. Soft sand absorbed the blow.
Seconds passed before I got my breath back and lurched up.
“Prospi Desert,” Poppy barked, shielding her face with a hand. “It’s famous for being entirely uninhabitable except for the Dryads who’ve built their city inside of it. Unseelie tend to resort to drastic measures of protection. Most of ’em, anyway.”
Dunes rolled, turbulent waves in a granular ocean. Flaxen drifts bled against a blue sky, the color bleached by the sun until a line of amber on the horizon cut earth from sky.
Poppy was already hiking away from me, leaving me to catch up.
“I can’t find their capital city with my magic,” she called back. “So we have to hike into the desert on foot and look for signs. The same as anyone else.”
Prospi stretched unmercifully in front of us, without end, an alien sort of wilderness. Poppy might as well have dumped us in a different world. Only the energy of the land felt familiar. The landscape itself? Not so much.
I took another step and sank in sand up to my ankle. The next step brought me to my knees, the sand sucking me down. It was hard going, and the little bit of sleep I’d gotten hadn’t dispelled my exhaustion.
Plus it was damn hot.
There were no rock formations, no cliffs to hide under to protect us from the awful burn of sun on sand.
“I hope you brought some water,” I called to Poppy.
She kept marching, oblivious to the way the sand sank around her. “Keep going. I’d like to find Areia before sundown. Otherwise we’ll have to camp. I got us close but not close enough to count.”
She shouldered her pack much better than I did.
Was I a camping fanatic at this point? I’d been out in the wilderness enough to call myself adept. But give me trees, mountains, or cold. Give me anything beyond the endless melting heat and the way it danced over the sand in shimmering waves.
Within twenty minutes, my clothes clung to my skin, soaked through with sweat. My eyes burned, the moisture sucked right out of them. The sun scalded and the temperature continually rose with its trek across the sky.
We were like ants beneath a magnifying glass.
“Stop here.” Poppy dropped her bag. “We’ll hydrate.”
“I thought you said you didn’t pack water?” I grunted.
“You need to learn to listen to what I don’t say instead of making shit up.”
She sounded so much like the Barbara I’d met, in my desperation for a way into the Fae Academy, that I wanted to cry. Too bad I’m a dried-up husk of a person.
Poppy dropped into a cross-legged seat on the sand as though it weren’t smoldering through her clothes. Elfhame’s map rested on one knee, pinned in place by Poppy’s index finger, as she perused a metal compass on the other knee.
“Damn thing,” she muttered. “Clear as day and I still can’t figure it out.”
I pried open the bag she’d packed for me and found three bottles of water nestled in a neat trio and tied with string. I pulled one free and downed half of it in one swig. The drip down my chin dried in an instant.
“What’s wrong?”
“Getting lost is a real possibility. These are vague at best. Elfhame did her best but damn it, those Dryads make it hard to find them. Don’t blame them, though. Never been there myself, and with my power stunted by the magic in this place…”
Poppy tossed the map and compass and sprawled. Eyes closed, she grabbed her own bottle of water and poured a bit over her face.
“Just makes things harder than I wish they were. Even for someone like me.”
“The great Oxana the Sightless, famed Seer of the land of Faerie, can’t read directions?”
She pointed a finger at me and magic crackled around her fingernail, short-circuiting. “Shut up. Don’t use my skills against me. There are protections in place to keep the Dryads safe, not just from the king and his crusade against lesser Fae.”
“You’re talking about Dorian Jade?”
“I’m talking about other things. Things we don’t want to speak about out here without protection.”
The sand offered no comfortable seats. And with no escape from the sun’s glare or the heat, the rest of the journey would be equally miserable.
“You’d better eat something. We’ll have to get going.”
“Can’t you do something about this? Conjure some shade?” I gestured overhead. “Please?”
“Nope. Prospi is a dead zone for witch magic. I won’t be able to get us out of trouble if we get lost, either. Keep that in mind.”
“Then you’ll want to watch to make sure the wind doesn’t steal our map.”
She snatched at the map just before it threatened to fly away. “I’ve got it covered, thanks.”
We traveled for most of the day. The unrelenting heat, the light, the awful shifting sand made keeping a steady course impossible. With each new dune crested, I prayed we’d reached the end of the journey.
But the desert stretched out ahead in a never-ending expanse.
Gold shifted into orange and brown. Tall dunes cast shadows that inevitably disappeared by the time we trekked toward them.
No stopping. No rest. No Dryads.